Reversing Over Anchor Optimization Penalities

Hey guys, I am trying to wrap my head around why my clients site is not ranking in google and its a bit of a puzzle I was wondering if someone here might be able to help me solve.

This is what I do know.

The site is not ranking well at all in google.

However the site is ranking in the top 3-10 for some pretty competitive keywords in both yahoo and bing.

The website has a pretty worthy backlink profile. Showing about 40,000 do follow links and almost 0 no follow. Its clear this site was spammed by a SEO company in the past sometime in 2011.

The anchor text is 99% the main keyword, all other keywords are almost non existent for anchor text.

I pulled it up in semrush and I can see in late 2011 early 2012 the site was ranking well and getting google traffic, today it is google traffic is about 0.

Im assuming that the panda and penguin have penalized this site and thats why google is not liking it, yet yahoo and bing seem ok with it?

Im assuming that the major penalty here is anchor text diversity. Obviously it is a problem, so I am hitting the site with a large mix of no follow and do follow links using about 50 new keywords to try and increase anchor text variation. I am trying to do this without spamming too hard and bringing in further link velocity penalties. I have a few months here to bring in results. If i bring the total backlink profile up to about 100K with new anchor text links over the next few months do you guys think this will get the site ranking again in google?

There are no major on page seo issues other than a bit of lack of textual content which I am recommending he increase.

However, I feel that I could still be missing something. How is it that it can be ranking really well in bing/yahoo yet so poorly in Google. Could there be any other issues that would be causing a website with a large backlink profile not to rank almost at all in google?

However, I feel that I could still be missing something. How is it that it can be ranking really well in bing/yahoo yet so poorly in Google. Could there be any other issues that would be causing a website with a large backlink profile not to rank almost at all in google?

Click to expand...

Diverse anchor text is an important ranking factor, but it's not the only one.

What we recommend you to do is to check all your site backlinks and weed out the ones that don't comply with the current Google's requirements.

First, you need to collect a maximally full pattern of your site existing backlinks. You can use any free or paid backlink checker for that.

When done, analyze links to various SEO important criteria (some backlink tools will help you do that fast) and sort out the ones that:

- come from websites with low or no PR;
- come from site with poor Alexa Rank;
- sitewide links;
- multiple links from the same IP address;
- and last but not least, links that have over-optimized anchors.

When you finish with that, either disavow all poor quality links or contact webmasters of the websites/blogs these links are placed on, and ask them to remove the links.

Next, when you will be building links to your site, pay attention to all the above mentioned factors.

Diverse anchor text is an important ranking factor, but it's not the only one.

What we recommend you to do is to check all your site backlinks and weed out the ones that don't comply with the current Google's requirements.

First, you need to collect a maximally full pattern of your site existing backlinks. You can use any free or paid backlink checker for that.

When done, analyze links to various SEO important criteria (some backlink tools will help you do that fast) and sort out the ones that:

- come from websites with low or no PR;
- come from site with poor Alexa Rank;
- sitewide links;
- multiple links from the same IP address;
- and last but not least, links that have over-optimized anchors.

When you finish with that, either disavow all poor quality links or contact webmasters of the websites/blogs these links are placed on, and ask them to remove the links.

Next, when you will be building links to your site, pay attention to all the above mentioned factors.

Click to expand...

Hi Can you mention a few of the tools you would use, to sift through the links?Thanks

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